Testimony of Healing December 7, 1912 Issue

Christian Science came to me over five years ago when I...

John S. Hawley

Christian Science came to me over five years ago when I was in intense suffering, in a condition of hopelessness, and neither expecting nor desiring to live. My greatest wish was that I might be annihilated, and I thought God cruel because He did not meet this wish, which in my ignorance I thought a very easy thing for Him to do. Prior to this I had for seventy years been in darkness, wandering through the wilderness of human experience and seeing only false and delusive lights. I desired to be a religious man, so I attended and supported various churches, finding in them many good people and making friends among them all, "orthodox" and "liberal" (which are much nearer alike than is generally supposed), and finally I became a member of one of the latter. I had always entertained a high opinion of will-power, and was therefore a good subject to embrace mental science, which I did while in a condition of great physical suffering. For a time this seemed to help me, and for some years I was a believer in its claims.

Six years ago I removed from Yonkers, N. Y., to San Diego, Cal. For many years I had been suffering from a bladder trouble which began when I weas a boy. It attacked me periodically at first, but afterward became chronic and always with a tendency to grow worse. About this time the climax seemed to have arrived. I was utterly disheartened and discouraged. There seemed at most but a few days of suffering before me. Job's condition was not worse than mine when he said, "God hath overthrown me." So I also felt. I wished for mental science treatment, but no one of that belief was to be found in San Diego. My faith in medicine had long since been rudely shattered and there seemed no possibility of help from any source.

At this time a neighbor spoke to me of Christian Science, although not a believer in it. My wife and I consulted together and decided that it could do no harm, and a practitioner was sent for. She came, and began by speaking of the allness and goodness of God! This almost angered me, and pointing to portraits of my father and mother on the opposite side of the room, I said that they were better than God, for neither of them would ever have permitted such suffering as I was enduring. "Erring though I may be," I cried, "what have I ever done to deserve this?" This and more I said of what to me seemed God's cruelty. I thought I knew something of Christian Science by what I had heard through mental science lectures and books, also through newspapers, magazines, etc., but I found I was utterly ignorant of it.

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